I have just learned of the great Open Office program which allowed me to get my Word Perfect files from an old computer to be readable in Windows 7. I am trying to get familiar with the tools for writing documents and text.

I am having trouble trying to turn highlighting of text off and on. I have found where the highlighting button is and all the colors that are there to activate. But when I selected a color and highlighted the text I wanted to have highlighted, I can find no way to turn it off again. In Word Perfect, it was click to turn on and then click again to turn off.

I see that doing the same thing here changes the button from dark gray to light gray which I thought was activating it and deactivating it the same as Word Perfect. But no matter what I do, the highlighting color wants to continue on new text that I type. I cannot turn off the highlight color to go back to only black font again. I also can't find anything on the topic of highlighting text anywhere in the help menu.

Could someone please tell me what the secret is to turn highlight on and off in Open Office? Thanks.

I tried that but it highlighted the entire line when all I wanted was a few select words to be highlighted. Then no matter what I did to undo the steps to erase everything and try again, it would not undo the steps as I did them. This is much more complicated than Word Perfect.

I simply want to be able to highlight words I select by holding down the left click and dragging the mouse. And then to continue without any color background going back to black text on white background. The bold, underline, italics etc...they all work by clicking once to activate and clicking again to deactivate, just as they did in WP. But I can't seem to make the highlighting work on Open Office on specifically what I want to highlight and then to release it.

montana722 wrote:I tried that but it highlighted the entire line when all I wanted was a few select words to be highlighted.

Are you sure you didn't click the Background Color button instead of the Highlighting button? The Background Color button changes the background color of the entire paragraph. The Highlighting button changes the background color of selected characters.

The only two buttons I could find that had any color choice functions were right next to each other on the same toolbar line as the bold, the underline, the bullets and the indent settings. It's at the far right of the 3rd line down.

One says "font color" ...... the other "background color" The line right below it says "New theme" and then it gives a description I don't understand either. I also wanted to set my default font as Arial....but I haven't been able to do that yet as well.

I hovered my cursor over every single icon and none of them said "highlight" or anything similar. That's why I thought it had to be one of those two buttons. I got everything from what I explained in the first post to a "sprinkler can" looking symbol.

I think I have finally figured out my problems after hours of trial and error. I added some toolbars experimenting with what happened with each one and I finally got a button labeled "highlighting." It doesn't work exactly the same as Word Perfect but it is similar. It is now between the font color and background color. I used the control+M and then I was able to type without the color background in plain black text again and complete what I wanted to do.